Reader Matt has pointed out a potentially concerning development regarding Spotify gift cards. At some point earlier this year they made an update which states:
Gift cards are valid for 12 months from the date of purchase.
I imagine a lot of people who buy Spotify gift cards will apply them to their account immediately and so for them this wouldn’t matter. However, might stock up on the annual plan gift cards now in anticipation of future price increases. For example, a few months ago I bought a couple of $99 annual Spotify gift cards when there was one of the ‘redeem 1 Membership Rewards point & get x% off’. I applied one to my account straight away, but another quirk Spotify has is that you can only have a maximum of 18 months of credit applied to your account. That meant I couldn’t apply the second card to my account, so I set myself a calendar reminder for April 2024 to redeem it then. I’ll therefore be within that 12 month of purchase date requirement, but others might not be so lucky.
I’m not too sure as to the legality of Spotify’s gift card terms. The FDIC has the following rule:
Under the law, a gift card cannot expire until at least five years from the date it was activated.
It would seem that Spotify’s policy falls afoul of that law, but perhaps there’s a loophole because Spotify is based overseas? I wouldn’t want to find out the hard way though that they have a legal loophole, so if you’ve stocked up on Spotify gift cards in the past, be sure to redeem them within 12 months.
Unless it’s changed, the back of the cards say they are issued by Spotify USA, a Delaware corporation, so they are indeed subject to US laws.
Weird, while that language does appear on the gift card overview page, it is explicitly contradicted by the current terms and conditions (which the overview page links to). Specifically, section 7 of the current gift cards terms very explicitly says “Cards do not expire, and no inactivity fees or service fees apply.”
Further, I’m not even sure they could retroactively apply such an expiration to existing cards even if they wanted to.
Messy.
Perhaps they had a mix up and are using terms for another country, which would be really sloppy legal work. But they should be called out on it and I bet it would get fixed.
Note that some US state laws provide stronger consumer protections for GCs than FDIC. i.e. CA 1749.5 generally prohibits expiration or dormancy fees.
I’m trying to figure this out too. On another thread it says it was resolved 3 years ago but it doesn’t seem to be.
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Subscriptions/Conflicting-gift-card-expiry-information/td-p/4833264